Filament Statistics: A Quantitative Comparison of Cold + Hot and Cold Dark Matter Cosmologies with CfA1 Data

A new class of geometric statistics for analyzing galaxy catalogs is presented. Filament statistics quantify filamentarity and planarity in large scale structure in a manner consistent with catalog visualizations. These statistics are based on sequences of spatial links which follow local high-density structures. From these link sequences we compute the discrete curvature, planarity, and torsion. Filament statistics are applied to CDM and CHDM (Ων = 0.3) simulations of Klypin et al.(1995), the CfA1-like sky catalogs of Nolthenius, Klypin and Primack (1994, 1995), and the CfA1 catalog. For 100 Mpc periodic simulation boxes (H0 = 50 km s −1 Mpc−1), we find robust discrimination of over 4σ (where σ represents resampling errors) between CHDM and CDM. The reduced filament statistics show that CfA1 data is intermediate between CHDM and CDM, but more consistent with the CHDM models. Filament statistics provide robust and discriminatory shape statistics with which to test cosmological simulations of various models against present and future redshift survey data.